[draft] Achilles glanced up from his writing atop the Tortoise[1] and exclaimed, “Look! The Hare has caught up.” “No,” said the Tortoise apprehensively, “that isn’t the Hare, but the Hare’s all too clever cousin, the HareLoon.” “A real HareLoon! I’ve only ever seen them in pictures.” “Don’t get so worked up. She is always in a hurry but I can never tell if she is coming or going.” “Ah, but you should know the HareLoon […]
Author: nogre
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Punny Logic
Update 12 Feb: This post had been expanded upon and, after submission, accepted for publication in Analysis published by Oxford University Press. View the final version here. [draft] It is hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they take things literally. On the surface, this statement is a statement of logic, with a premise and conclusion. Given the premise: Kleptomaniacs take things literally. We may deduce the conclusion: It is hard to explain puns to […]
Xmas post
Happy Holidays! As is my Xmas tradition, I watched “Die Hard”. Surprisingly one of the characters reminded me of the current state of internet philosophy:
xkcd on the Trolley Problem
https://xkcd.com/1455/
On the Dangers of Running the PGR
Something that caught my eye in the recent PGR debate was a compliment of the anti-PGR faction’s organizational skills that was stated right along side an insult to their actions. Specifically: “I really do not understand what is going on. You [did x]… The response has been a well-organized attempt to force you to [do y]. But [doing x] had exactly nothing to do with [doing y].” This well-organization stands in contrast to: “I would […]
Guidelines for Submitting to Philosophy Journals
Based on recent reviewers’ reports, I’ve come up with some quick guidelines to reference when submitting to philosophy journals: 1. Do not make an argument in your paper. If you do, it will be ignored, and hence is a waste of everyone’s time. Do not fear, though: The reviewer will tell you what argument should have been written and how you failed to provide sufficient supporting justifications for that argument. 2. Building and supporting the […]
Site Update 2014
After running this site for 7 years, I have done a comprehensive update of the systems that run it, namely migrating it to a brand new database. This has increased the site speed, noticeable in page loading times especially on the calendar. The calendar is going strong, with many talks and events for the Fall of 2014. Please check it out if you are in the New York City metropolitan area.
On the defense of ‘Evolutionary and Newtonian Forces’
Dr. Ellen Clark, a.k.a. Philosomama, has written a good review of Velasco & Hitchcock’s Evolutionary and Newtonian Forces [no paywall], one of the first papers to appear in the new open access journal Ergo. She points out that although V&H are trying to show how evolutionary forces are well described by analogy to classical causal Newtonian forces, they very nearly prove their opponent’s — the statisticalist — position. However, she comes to their defense. Briefly, […]
On Metaphysical Proficiency
Are you good at metaphysics? How good are you at metaphysics? When I consider these questions, the only sure thing is that there is no objective measure of metaphysical proficiency. I can’t even imagine standards by which we could judge it. It would be at least as hard to estimate as intelligence, and anyway, I doubt smarts correlates with metaphysical skill. Lots of smart people have said a lot of ridiculous things. I like to […]